Real Sex by Lauren F. Winner

Author:Lauren F. Winner
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2005-11-04T05:00:00+00:00

Lie #3: Bodies (and Sex) are Gross, Dirty, or Just Plain Unimportant

In chapter two, we talked a little about Gnosticism—the heretical idea that our bodies are bad, or that our bodies are unimportant, or that our bodies are not part of what really makes us human. This anxiety about bodies runs counter to the radical embodiment of the Christian story—which unequivocally proclaims that we were created with bodies, that God called our bodies good, that Jesus came as a body and saved us with His body, and that He is and we will be resurrected as bodies. As Paul tells the Corinthians: “You were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.”

And yet Christians have been beset by ambivalence about bodily matters, especially sex, from Paul’s day to the present. Many of us share a sneaking suspicion that bodies don’t matter. Or we’re confused about what role bodies play in our spiritual lives. Or we think of Christianity as something we do with our souls and minds and hearts; our bodies get sort of left behind. (To wit, an informal poll conducted by a friend who teaches at a small Christian college. He asked one of his classes how many of the students believed in a bodily resurrection, and of the thirty-five students, only five said they did.)

The screen on which the contemporary church works out its anxieties about bodies is sexuality. Too often, Christians’ aching discomfort with bodies gets transmitted into how we do sex; our anxiety about bodies morphs into anxiety about, or repugnance toward, sexual desire and sexual acts. If we fear our bodies because they are undisciplined and contingent, messy and willful, we then get especially freaked out about sex, which is one of the places where our bodies are most willful and messiest. When the body becomes something to escape from, the sexual body becomes something to vilify.

I want to tell you a story about my friends Charlie and Suzanne. They should have had a picture-perfect wedding night. They had both grown up in strong Christian families, and they had both determined as high-schoolers to save sex for marriage. They met their senior year of college, and were engaged eight months later. And they dutifully refrained from having sex before they were married; in fact, before they got engaged they did no more than kiss.

Their honeymoon was to be spent at a quaint cottage in the countryside. Friends and family had suggested they go to Paris or Rome, but Suzanne laughed and said, “We’ll go to Paris later when we might want to spend time at museums and bistros.” In other words, they’d waited for sex and assumed they’d want to spend most of their honeymoon in bed.

But their wedding night was, in Suzanne’s words, “a disaster.” Though Charlie was eager to make the beast with two backs (that’s Shakespeare’s felicitous phrase, not my own), she simply did not want to have sex. “I did have sex, of course, because … that’s what you do.

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